About Our Reviews

Disclosure: Our content does not constitute financial advice. Speak to your financial advisor. We may earn money from companies reviewed.  Learn more

How do our rankings work?

At Gold IRA Guide, we developed a uniquely independent Global Rating system (GR) that involves gathering ratings and reviews from several external review boards that are known to be trustworthy and independent. Also, the review sites we choose must NOT have any affiliate relationships or financial incentives with the companies or products they review.

We then come up with a weighted mean based on all the average ratings we have gathered from those sites The weighted mean considers the average rating AND the number of reviews from each site. 

Here's the list of review sites we currently consider:

• BBB
• BCA
• TrustPilot
• TrustLink
• Yelp
• Facebook
• Google GMB
• ShopperApproved
• Yellow Pages
• City Search
• Yahoo
• SiteJabber

Note: This list is subject to change at any point so please check back often. Feel free to contact us if you want to suggest a new site to be added to our trusted review sites list. We only consider the sites that are known for being truly independent and trusted for their unbiased reviews, and that do NOT have a financial or affiliate relationship with the companies rated. 

The math

The weighted mean differs from the average, in the sense that it takes into consideration the total number of reviews from each site. For instance, if we wanted to calculate our weighted mean based on the reviews gathered from 3 different sites, our math formula would be:

Example Review Scenario #1:

Let's assume we want to review Company X (fictional company)to be considered for inclusion as part of our Precious Metal IRA Reviews. We start by “googling” the brand name plus the word “reviews”, so in this case, our search query will be “Company X Reviews”. We then gather all the reviews we can find, but remember that we only consider the sites we have shortlisted above.  

Now, let's assume we only find the following ratings for Company X after thoroughly combing through the Google search results:

• BBB: 4.8 stars total out of 300 reviews
• Google GMB: 4.5 stars out of 120 reviews
• Yelp: 1 star out of 3 reviews

Our global rating for Company X will be calculated as follows: 

Example Review Scenario #2:

Let's assume Company Y has the following ratings:

• TrustPilot: 4 stars out of 100 reviews
• TrustLink: 3.8 stars out of 1200 reviews
• Yelp: 1 star out of 15 reviews
• Facebook: 1 star out of 2 reviews
• Google GMB: 3.1 stars out of 34 reviews

Our global rating for Company Y would be calculated as follows: